“Posted at 09:06 AM ET,
04/04/2012
The
Morning Plum: Obamacare may perish. What would GOP do about tens of millions of
uninsured?
By Greg Sargent
As I’ve been noting here,
the Supreme Court deliberations really should be focusing the conversation a
bit more on this question: If Republicans get their way, and Obamacare is
struck down, what would they do
about the nation’s tens of millions of uninsured?
Today’s New York Times has a good piece in which leading
Republicans are asked this question. The answer still appears to be:
To Be Determined.
The thought that our Supreme Court
might find the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional is truly frightening. This nation has an immense problem delivering
health care to those who can’t afford to pay the spiraling salaries and geometrically
increasing bonuses of the health insurance corporations' executives. This nation has as much as 1/6 of its
population with no access to health care other than by further clogging the
already over-burdened ERs of not-for-profit hospitals.
The GOP has been railing against
Medicare and Medicaid since they became laws.
The GOP turns collectively red-faced and screams in chorus, “socialism,
communism,” whenever single-payer, universal health care for all citizens is
suggested as an answer to our uninsured citizen’s problem. This has not changed in decades. Only the face and voices of the
anti-cheer-leaders in Congress change as the obstructionists rotate through the
latest attempt to abolish care for the uninsured.
The standard joke, that the
GOP/teavangelist’ health care plan is to ignore everyone but the wealthy;
results in the algorithm for health care planning – “Get sick, die quick!” Of course, this sounds like a poorly written
policy response by the Democrats and others who believe health care should be
readily available to all citizens. It
sounds like a bad joke, but it isn’t. The GOP has argued against Medicare and
universal insurance since 1964 at least.
They’ve protested what Congress passed and promised alternatives to
improve and broaden health care coverage.
It is now 2012. They may get their wish. A thoroughly hostile to universal care SCOTUS
sits ready to hand them the keys to the medicine locker. What do they have to replace the ACA? How are they going to improve and stabilize
Medicare?
They are not going to do a damned
thing except to force seniors into a voucher replacement for Medicare that will
not be affordable and that will not provide care of an adequate nature. The poor, the aging, the unemployed, and the
former middle class and working class will be studiously ignored by insurance
companies that will be appointed by Congress to determine who gets care and who
dies.
The GOP has refused to realistically
fund health care and create universal insurance since the Goldwater days. The teavangelists are too busy shouting that
they don’t want to pay for anyone else’s health care to realize that the
Medicare and non-profit-hospitals they make use of is a socialist form of
government program.
It just may be that the teavangelists
will get their wish about health care. I can guarantee that they won’t like it
when they finally realize that the GOP has used them and thrown them aside as
it has done with every other bit of the citizenry.
I find myself hoping that the
teavangelists have time to understand how poorly they have served their fellow
men and women by buying into the GOP greed.
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